UN relief official to visit four East African countries facing humanitarian crises

United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland will begin a nine-day mission to East Africa on Thursday, visiting four countries that are suffering humanitarian crises due to conflict or natural causes.

Mr. Egeland’s first port of call will be Uganda, where a 20-year-long rebellion by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has uprooted almost 2 million civilians amid accusations of grave human rights violations by the rebels, including the kidnapping of thousands of children as fighters or “wives.”

He will gain a firsthand view of the situation by visiting the north, where the conflict has spilled over into southern Sudan through the presence of LRA forces there.

From Uganda, he travels to Juba in southern Sudan, where the UN Mission in the country (UNMIS) is preparing for the return of more than 4 million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) after a peace accord last year ended two decades of fighting between the Government and southern rebels. Mr. Egeland will visit an IDP way station there.

He will then go to Nyala in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where a separate conflict between Government forces, pro-government militias and rebels has led to the deaths of at least 180,000 people and uprooted more than 2 million others over the past three years. While there he will visit an IDP camp run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Mr. Egeland will next visit a Sudanese refugee camp in eastern Chad housing some of those who have fled Darfur before returning to Sudan for meetings in the capital, Khartoum, with Government and UNMIS officials.

On the final day of the mission, Mr. Egeland will travel to Nairobi, Kenya, where severe drought has affected 3.5 million people.